Junkers Come Here v2 (Laserdisc)

In my original blog post for the 1994 OVA Junkers Come Here:Memories of You, I wrote, "The show was never released on laserdisc, let alone DVD." Well, I was wrong. The OVA was released on laserdisc and, thanks to the generosity of a colleague, WOWmd, Orphan is releasing a new version with much better visuals.

This fortuitous event is entirely due to my involuntary presence on Discord. As a technology Luddite and a social media-phobe, I refused to use Discord for a long time, preferring to stay with tried-and-true (that is, ancient and obsolete) Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Discord has voice chat, group meetings, graphics, and other features that I dislike; IRC is text only, which is as it should be. (I stopped playing computer games when text adventures like Zork went out of fashion in the 1980s.) But one of Orphan's newer team members refused to use IRC. He said he'd be on Discord and sent me an invite, so I could get in touch with him. And Inka Subs, with which we did several joint projects, only works on Discord. So now I'm in both worlds.

Discord has allowed me to meet a new generation of fansubbers interested in the back catalog, not just from Inka but from other teams as well (DarkWisper, LonelyChaser, etc.) Some of them have their own Domesday Duplicators and rip their own laserdiscs. They're happy to share, and this project is the result.

Junkers Comes Here: Memories of You centers around the four sisters of the Arimura family. Their mother disappeared on a trip to Paris, and their father died of a broken heart soon afterward. Now, eldest sister Haruka, 30, is the head of the household, having put her own hopes and plans on hold to raise her sisters. Next in line is Natsuno, an office lady in her 20s, obsessed with romance. Third is the nominal protagonist, Akimi, in middle school, undergoing the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Youngest is Fuyuko, 10, an elementary school student with no memories of her mother at all.

Akimi is trying to escape the constant teasing she gets at school when she encounters Junkers on a riverbank. When the dog starts a conversation, Akimi is gobsmacked. She takes the dog home to her sisters, who are skeptical or disinterested, until Junkers miraculously fixes a broken tree and swing. Natsuno wastes one of Junkers' miracles on her love life, and the family starts squabbling about the last one. Then, a TV news program reports about a "mysterious Asian fashion designer" in Paris. It's clearly their mother Misako, and the girls set off to France, Junkers in tow, to find her. There will indeed be one more miracle, although not the obvious one.

The improvement in visual quality is significant and obvious. New:

Old:

The original blog post includes the voice credits, so I won't repeat them here. For the original release, Iri translated, ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset, and Nemesis, Topper3000, and Uchuu QCed. For this release, WOWmd ripped his own laserdisc on the Domesday Duplicator, as well as the digital audio track, and Orphan's media maven encoded.(in honor of the digital origin, the audio track is FLAC.) I shifted the subs and release-checked. Almost nothing had to be changed. Even the typesetting simply worked.

Junkers Come Here: Memories of You is straightforward and heartfelt. It's a welcome dose of positive feelings in the midst of our daily horror show. Dogs are good for the soul, Junkers especially. The new version has substantially better video than the original release, so whether you've seen Junkers Come Here: Memories of You already or are new to the show, you should download this version. You can get the it from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net. No, Orphan doesn't have Discord-based distribution.